The group will look into the issues of standardisation and interoperability of smart cards applications in e-commerce, Pant explains.

Care needs to be taken that it does not become necessary for an individual to replace the cards as one moves from one location to another or from one state to another, Pant elaborates.

Although the country has already evolved certain standards regarding the physical characteristics of smart cards and the electronic signal and transmission protocols, these in themselves do not assure interoperability, he claims.

This issue will have to be tackled at the national level for which the Planning Commission has proposed an expert group on e-commerce.

Pant claims smart cards are being evaluated for various applications with public interfaces like driving licenses, health information cards, security cards and for smart card based e-commerce.

He reveals that the Union government has instructed all its ministries and departments to prepare a five-year plan on it with the provision of 1 to 3 per cent of their budget outlay in order to ensure that every sector of the economy receives due attention.